ENV 3430 - Food and the Environment

Questions surrounding food – whether we produce enough of it for growing populations; eat the right kind of it for our health, culture, or environment; and around inequality in access and outcomes – are important subjects of contemporary concern, from within the United States to the Global South and everywhere in between. Production, distribution, and consumption of food are among the earliest and most central ways humans relate to their environment. Food thus serves as a key lens for thinking through human-environment relations, our history, and the challenges of the future. This class explores how the increasingly global food system came to be, its social and environmental implications for different peoples and places, and how it might change – and be changed. We will deploy a historical, geographical, and critical approach – drawing on an interdisciplinary array of scholarship from the social sciences, as well as insights from the physical sciences, humanities, journalistic, and popular treatments – to better understand our present moment. A geographical approach to food begins with the proposition that human-environment interactions are not uniform, preordained, or readily predictable. Rather, how food and other natural resources are produced, distributed, valued, consumed, conserved, and degraded are historically- and geographically-specific questions. Nonetheless, there are patterns that can be identified, discernable processes that have produced those patterns, and theories through which we might better understand and intervene around those processes.